From CNET: Nintendo's Wii U, which hasn't budged from third place in the console space, has finally reached an important milestone.
Nintendo sold its 10 millionth Wii U during its fiscal first quarter ended June 30, nearly three years after the console hit store shelves, the company reported on Wednesday in an earnings release. The milestone was undercut by disappointing Wii U sales of just 470,000 units worldwide during the three-month period. During the same quarter in 2014, Wii U sales reached 510,000 units.
Nintendo's portable gaming device, the 3DS, nabbed just over 1 million in unit sales during the period, up from 820,000 units last year. On the software side, Nintendo saw Wii U game sales jump year-over-year from 4.4 million units to 4.6 million in the last-reported quarter. Nintendo's 3DS software sales fell from 8.6 million in 2014 to 8 million this year.
The earnings release -- and the slow march to 10 million Wii U sales -- underscores Nintendo's ongoing trouble appealing to gamers across the gaming landscape. After leading the last console generation with its wildly popular Wii, Nintendo hoped for similar results with its Wii U launch in 2012. The company's device, which includes HD graphics and a gamepad that boasts a second screen for dual-display gaming, has not caught on in most markets around the world and has been relegated to third place against Sony's PlayStation 4 and Microsoft's Xbox One. In August 2014, Sony announced that it had sold its 10 millionth PlayStation 4 in under a year after the console's launch. It took Microsoft approximately a year to sell through 10 million Xbox One units. Nintendo's nearly three-year haul puts it far behind competitors.
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